Christopher Williams believes that one little box changed the trajectory of his life. Williams has been to prison more than once. When he was inside, he tried to prepare himself for the outside, for a chance to move on from the thing for which he’d done his time, by participating in job training programs and GED classes. But when he got out, that box — the box on job applications that asks if the applicant has ever been arrested or convicted of a crime — stopped him in his tracks.

Michael Brown didn’t get due process. The still unnamed police officer who shot the 18-year-old black teenager dead in Ferguson will get plenty of it. This is the root of the frustration that is driving the African-American community to the streets in north St. Louis County over yet another senseless killing of a young black man.

On Sept. 16, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics released its latest count of the nation’s prison population. The report—“Prisoners in 2013”—provides detailed data on both state and federal prisons as of yearend 2013. The data shows mixed results in the battle to reduce mass incarceration.